For a short while, they were nothing more than three young friends enjoying the thrill of zipping through the deserted Marine base at insane speeds. It didn’t take long, though, for the gravity of the situation to reassert itself. Arun had paid a high price to get here. He was seeking an alien with the ability to see into his future… and, Arun prayed, the Night Hummer was the only one who could justify his decision to withdraw Beowulf from Detroit’s defense.
— Chapter 56 —
“Report!”
Loobie grimaced before responding: the news wasn’t great. “Laser batteries 3 and 5 hit the first projectile halfway between Antilles and Tranquility, and that did nudge it slightly off course. However, my analysis is that the enemy bombardment is so inaccurate, and the effect of our laser strike so minimal, that we’re just as likely to have steered the projectile onto the target as to knock it off.”
“As I feared,” said Captain Indiya, “but we had to try. Helm, accelerate to intercept likely trajectory of next projectile. If we get close enough, we can hit it with missiles. We won’t blast it to atoms, but we might fracture it.”
“Closing on projectile vector, aye,” confirmed Pilot Officer Columbine.
Loobie had her doubts about the older woman’s loyalty, but since the human takeover of Beowulf Columbine had been completely professional, and utterly closed.
Mind you, thought Loobie, her heart lurching, I could say the same about Indiya.
Concerns for her friend were blasted instantly away when her tactical map revealed a new projectile slingshotting out of the moon’s gravity field.
“Too late…” she said. “Here comes the second projectile. Launching missiles now.”
“Their fire rate is faster than I feared,” mused Indiya out loud. “Helm, set new course for Antilles. Get us close enough to that damned mass driver to take it out.”
“Attack vector laid in, aye.”
Silently, Loobie prayed to the Creator to protect her friends down on Tranquility. She didn’t believe the missiles would divert the projectile, which meant they’d let two projectiles get past them. There was no hope for anyone on the ground where they hit. At least for anyone caught near the impact location, death would be instant.
— Chapter 57 —
Arun, Xin and Umarov raced down to Level 9 at a breakneck pace.
But it still left far too much time for Arun to think.
What exactly bound him to the Hummers?
Long ago he’d pledged to take the Hummers under human protection as a client species. But they were just words, weren’t they? And preposterously unrealistic ones, or so they’d seemed at the time.
He’d never given an oath to his human comrades. Didn’t need to. They came first.
So why had he dropped everything in his haste to rescue this Hummer? Was it simply to acquire a key strategic advantage?
What scared him most was his unshakable certainty that he was meant to meet with this Hummer at this precise time and place. He could call it a sense of destiny, his planner brain, or listening too much to Springer when she had her visions. But what if the Hummers had put him under mind control, or planted an irresistible suggestion in his mind? Surely that irrational certainty would be exactly what he would feel now.
And it was getting worse. Lately he’d felt this connection with the Hummers deepen, even though he’d hardly mentioned the pre-cog aliens to anyone for two years. Even beyond death, he knew his oath to the Hummers would still bind him, still determine the fate of trillions. It was crazy! How could he champion these aliens after he was dead? None of this made sense, but he knew it to be true.
Stop it! he told himself. Concentrate on practicalities.
He knew they would locate the Hummer soon… but what then?
He didn’t know how Hummers were moved around the base. The equipment would be around somewhere. He had no doubt they could shift the alien and its life support systems, but they were in a hurry. Beowulf should cut off the mass driver bombardment soon, but they had to extricate the alien, and fly it with them back to Detroit to save Brandt from being overrun.
He was thinking of the alien as they descended one of the main helix ramps as far as Level 7, when every thought was driven from his mind: the world suddenly tremored. The first impact from the mass driver had hit the planet.
Amazingly, the jet racks slowed to a halt but remained calmly hovering over the ground. The lights didn’t. All illumination snuffed out when the shockwave hit, and this far inside the underground base, there wasn’t even enough light for his helmet’s vision enhancement to work with. The darkness was so absolute that it took on a sludgy physical presence.
For several precious seconds, they waited in silence before the lighting recovered into an on-off flicker, strobing through the clouds of dust shaken into the air by the impact.
“Missed,” said Xin as she set off again through the dust. “We’d be dead if it hadn’t.”
“It’s only a matter of time before we catch one full on,” said the ever-cheerful Umarov.
Arun ignored them. His mind was on the deserted spineways and corridors beyond the helix. This was an accommodation level, housing dozens of hab-disks: self-contained company-sized citadels with their own air, food, water, armory, and route up to the surface.
What had happened to the hab-disks?
Rumor from Detroit was that having hacked so many of Beta City’s internal systems, the Hardits had simply sealed the exits from any hab-disk that housed Marines whose loyalty to the rebel cause was suspect.
There could be an army there, waiting to be freed and inducted into the Legion.
Or there could be a division of the dead, thousands upon thousands of grinning corpses.
Arun didn’t have enough time to stop and investigate. But he had far too much time to wonder.
With only a few wrong turnings, Xin led them to Level 9, where they soon located the Hummer in its life-support chamber, an exact replica of the one Xin had described seeing in Detroit even down to the reduced gravity. The jet racks were so confused by the gravity change that all three Marines were thrown to the ground by their mounts. Once he’d extricated himself from his rack, Arun could feel the massive power boost to his suit’s motors from the reduced gravity. Artificially reduced gravity! It was a technology Arun couldn’t quite believe, but there was no time to wonder.
The alien had been expecting them, just as Arun had known it would.
Inside a life-support tank was a stretched, midnight-blue globule, about three meters tall and surrounded by a fizzing orange liquid. Black bubbles rose from the bottom of the tank, sucked into the creature’s core. An equal volume of silver ribbons were spat out from its top.
The flicker of these silver streamers matched the beat underneath the low hum that filled Arun’s helmet, an insistent noise which occasionally burst into pulses of metallic fizz and swash.
The last Night Hummer he’d seen lived on a planetoid built to be a Hummer farm. It lived by itself, though, which it considered torture because it craved the company of its own kind. The setup here was rows of heavily shielded alcoves set into the walls, each with space to wrap a Night Hummer life support tank in a protective cradle. Again there was only one Hummer here.
The victorious faction in the civil war took the others away with them.
Arun felt the alien’s words in his head. It felt a little like his conversations with Barney. A little, too, as if an ice-cold blade was slowly penetrating his skull.
“Why didn’t they take you?” asked Xin. Interesting that the Hummer was talking with her too.
We hid me from their minds, came a cold reply that made Arun shiver. I had to remain here. I had to meet you.
“What about the other human?” asked Arun. “Umarov, he’s called. Can he hear you?”
No, nor can he hear you. His role is temporarily suspended.
Arun interrogated Umarov’s BattleNet signal. He was healthy, but silent and motionless. The alien had tempor
arily disabled him. And made it look easy. Just how powerful were these creatures?
I thank you, spoke the alien into Arun’s head. You cannot comprehend the calm I feel to know you came.
“Stow your thanks, Hummer,” said Xin, “We haven’t rescued you yet.”
Nor shall you. I do not thank you for my rescue, for you will not succeed. I thank you for giving me the satisfaction of proving my prediction correct. I knew you would come.
“Don’t be stupid, alien,” shouted Arun. “We’ve risked so much to reach this place. I’m not leaving without you. There must be a way. They didn’t just roll you down the helix ramp, did they? Is there a hover sled? How do we move you? How? Answer!”
But the alien’s only response was to increase the volume of its humming to punishing levels.
“I think we need to get the frakk out,” said Xin.
It would take another twenty seconds to realize how right she was.
— Chapter 58 —
Of the barrage Beowulf fired at the mass driver’s second projectile, only a single anti-ship missile hit. The ordnance in question was a 2-stage weapon designed to first burn a narrow gap through a target ship’s hull that the second stage could then pass through and explode.
Instead of a warship’s armored hull, the first stage of the missile accomplished the far easier task of penetrating the outer jacket of the ore package. The second stage, though, found it hard going against the compressed ore of the interior. It looked from the outside as if the blast had merely chipped away a modest cloud of stone fragments: superficial damage only.
But the energy of the missile’s impact and exploding payload sent hairline stress fractures spreading through the ore-projectile’s interior. When the missile’s energy had dissipated, the fractures stopped growing a long way short of breaking up the lump of compressed rock. The internal weakness was frozen, postponed, like a critically wounded soldier placed in a cryo pod.
The deep wound didn’t remain frozen for long.
At a speed of three hundred klicks per second, the projectile slammed into Tranquility’s upper atmosphere with an impact that released far more energy than Beowulf’s missile. Momentum carried the block of ore relentlessly down the gravity well. As the atmosphere thickened in the moments before it hit the ground, the forces resisting its descent strengthened, seeking weakness, and finding the hairline cracks.
Thirty klicks above the ground, the projectile was ripped apart. Now two fiery contrails burrowed their way down to the planet’s surface.
There was no defense.
Ironically, the projectile had been two hundred klicks off target. The larger of the two fragments span away harmlessly to impact the great plain in the continent’s interior in a fireball visible from space.
The smaller fragment, though, was thrown back on target: nearly a direct hit. Forty tons of compressed rock, its molten surface glowing red hot, struck the lifeless waters of Lake Sarpedona nine klicks away from the island entrance to Beta City.
The impact threw up a plume of water that reached the upper atmosphere. The ore package-turned-meteorite took only a fraction of a second to slice through the lake, boiling the water around it, before burrowing deep beneath the lake bottom. It launched a bubble of mud followed by millions of years of sedimentary accumulation instantly pulverized to dust, and thrown high into clouds that blotted out the sun.
The lake water filling the caldera spilled out over its lip in a miniature tsunami. The sudden release of megatons of water, churning with stone and dust, gouged a deep channel along its route to the distant ocean.
Much of the lake’s water remained inside the caldera, though, acting as a medium for the shockwaves that were about to pummel Beta City on a destructive scale that no weapon in the Human Legion’s arsenal could hope to match.
The initial pressure pulse pushed out through the lake’s water at 210 meters per second, leaving the occupants of the city 23 seconds before the destruction hit.
But there was one inside the underwater city who already knew the shockwave was coming.
The Hummer had seen this drama play out countless times over the past few decades…
— Chapter 59 —
The Night Hummer ceased its humming abruptly and spoke aloud through a hidden speaker. “The base is hardened against bombardment from the outside, but when you set off your gamma bomb you compromised the city’s impact absorbers. These devices are related to the heat sinks used in warships and railguns. They can soak up enormous energies and shift them elsewhere, into other dimensions. The city’s absorbers no longer function.”
“Why are you mentioning–?” Before Arun could finish his thought, the shockwave hit Beta City.
Arun had just enough time to hear the crack of impact and the sound of metal being torn and ceramics shattered before his hearing and several other senses, went into emergency shutdown. Then it felt like a spiked gauntlet rammed itself down his throat and tore out his lungs.
Arun’s scream was agonizing but he could not stop himself. The inside of his helmet clouded with blood-spatter and he kept screaming until the fuzziness multiplied, crowding out all thoughts until his consciousness was finally suffocated, and he disconnected from the world outside of his skull.
When his senses eased back, he checked the chronometers in his head and found only about ten seconds had elapsed since the shockwave’s impact. He hadn’t even fallen over – Barney having kept his battlesuit upright on his behalf. The AI decided his human was recovered sufficiently and flooded him with critical injury reports of severe concussion and hemorrhaging in Arun’s gut and lungs.
“The underwater hull integrity of Beta City has been breached in seven locations,” reported the alien, sounding as unruffled as ever, even though Arun could see the orange fluid in its tank was rapidly darkening. “Consequently, Beta City will flood before nightfall.”
“How can you tell all this?” asked Arun, struggling to form words in his confused state. “Are you wired up to the base AI?” Simultaneously, he tasked Barney with a threat assessment.
“I know because I have seen this. I have experienced this day from many perspectives. Every day of every year of every decade I see the moment of my termination.”
It didn’t look good for the Hummer. The silver streamers flapping in its circulatory system went limp. The flow of bubbles slowed.
Barney reported indications of several electrical fires starting up nearby.
“I die consumed in fire,” explained the Hummer. “Boiled in my tank before the flood water reaches me. In four minutes, the air throughout this entire level will ignite. It would be best that you humans leave before then. Flee!”
“But we can’t leave you,” Arun insisted. Confused, he scratched his head, but then snapped his hand away because his head hurt. “I swore an oath to protect you.”
“No, you swore an oath to tend to my people, not this individual. I hold you to your oath. And your oath says you must go, leave me. You cannot protect my people if you are dead.”
“Very well!” Arun was shouting now, in a rage that had swirled in from nowhere. “No riddles, alien. You’re out of time, and I’m out of patience. You reached out somehow and brought me here. But now you say we cannot save you. So tell me this: why the frakk am I here?”
“Your purpose was to make a sacrifice, one that hurt enough to bind you to your destiny.”
Arun felt the anger streaming out from Xin. He only just managed his own enough to speak. “My comrades in Detroit,” he shouted, even though speaking above a whisper tore at his raw throat and lungs. “Innocent lives – were sacrificed just so that you could make a frakking point?”
“Mostly, yes. But also so I could communicate data. You will soon leave this stellar system for the time being. You need fresh goals, new targets to focus your attention. First you must go to the planet known to the Jotuns as Shepherd-Nurture-4. Then – when your forces are strong enough – liberate my home system. You will not find it in yo
ur astrogation database. Coordinates are 127541.06, 356122, 9011121.”
“Leave the veck” shouted Xin while Arun verified he had safely committed the coordinates to one of his digital memory augmentations in his head.
Arun ignored her, preferring to glare at the dying alien blob. “I will fulfill my oath, alien. But know this. If you are a typical example of your species, then I have no love for you. If my species must deal with yours, I will make sure to exploit your people ruthlessly. It’s only what you deserve.”
But you must nurture us… said the alien in his mind. For the first time, it sounded worried.
From her jet rack, Xin shouted at Arun: “For frakk’s sake, quit your drama-mouthing already, Major. Mount up and go!”
Arun spoke in his mind, confident the alien would hear. You’re about to boil in your tank, Hummer... I hope it hurts.
He fell into his jet rack, and together the humans fled the drowning Marine base.
— Chapter 60 —
“Here they come,” announced Exelmans from the observation post. “Sector 11. Approx. 2,500 Hardit infantry. They’re descending down the mountain paths from the west. Sending co-ordinates now.”
A second later came the response. “Charlie Battery launching anti-personnel strike in 3… 2… 1… firing! Missiles away. Ordnance status nominal.”
Brandt watched the missiles’ progress in the holographic battlemap set up in his command post in the underground redoubt near Gate Three, the only one of Detroit’s main gates that was still open after the destruction of the civil war.
It had been less than a week since Hecht had flown a noisy recon drone into this same redoubt. Hecht’s drone had discovered human Resistance fighters. Now dozens of them were guarding the approaches to the undercity far below Brandt’s position.
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